14
The Aftermath

Damage to CIA

What Hersh and Congress did was to punish CIA by publicity. By having CIA operations constantly exposed, denigrated, and pillared by the press and Congress, American intelligence was impaired for some time and CI was severely damaged and has been living on life support ever since. In the intelligence arena, some might point out that ongoing CIA operations against the KGB and GRU were still effective, and that CIA’s exchange of CI leads with friendly liaison services and efforts to educate liaison services to the nature of the Soviet intelligence threat and how to cope with it remained particularly productive. They would mention that in the period January 1, 1976–October 20, 1977, in twenty countries, forty-two KGB/GRU officers were declared persona non grata (PNG) and nine others were asked to leave without formal PNG action. The government of Sudan ordered all ninety-two members of the Soviet military air program to leave, and it cut forty slots from the Soviet Embassy in Khartoum.
During the same period, thirty-eight KGB/GRU agent assets were detected and arrested. The uncovering of these agents, they would argue, represented a great setback for Soviet intelligence. Many PNG actions and agent rollups came about directly or indirectly through leads provided by defectors, CI investigation, or through double-agent operations, including several U.S. military double agents whose use was coordinated by CIA with the appropriate foreign intelligence and security service and the U.S. military service involved. In addition, the French marked eight Soviet officials PNG who were detected by the French security service in espionage operations directed against French scientific and technology establishments.
While these statistics might indicate that the scope and effectiveness of CIA’s conventional intelligence gathering and CI activities increased, the opposite is true. Because of the impediments imposed on our initiatives by political and congressional restraints and cumbersome coordination requirements, CIA’s covert operations did not fare as well. Soviet meddling in the affairs of other countries and international Communist fronts did provide CIA with some opportunities to use media assets to expose KGB activities in these two areas. In the past, particularly the period 1969–72, CIA regularly conducted extensive propaganda campaigns against the Soviets and their intelligence services.
It can be argued that much of the adverse publicity we received abroad derived from the spontaneous reactions to the Church and Pike Committee hearings, as well as the publications of disaffected bureaucrats like John D. Marks and Victor L. Marchetti.1 In other words, the KGB was not responsible for the ten anti-CIA propaganda articles. Anyone who has seriously studied the KGB knows that this was not the case. KGB-controlled media assets energetically exploited material from the committee hearings, as well as the disclosures of former CIA officer Philip Agee, whose principal thrust was to expose the names of CIA officers in the foreign press. The international Communist fronts participated vigorously in the anti-CIA propaganda campaign, while KGB agents of influence acted behind the scenes to discredit the alleged role of CIA in U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution. There was also a marked increase in forgeries directed against the U.S. government, most of which are attributed to the KGB or its surrogates. As these forgeries escalated, they attempted to implicate the Agency in illicit activity overseas.
KGB/GRU and Soviet surrogates continued their recruitment activities against the United States. For example, in 1984 there were 481 incidents of U.S. Army soldiers being approached by people suspected of being Soviet Bloc intelligence officers or sympathizers. This represents only one specific Soviet target. There were probably more attempts, which were not reported, but unfortunately on the basis of available information it is very difficult to document the magnitude of hostile Soviet and Eastern Bloc operations against Americans.
This close monitoring of U.S. intelligence services by Soviet and currently Russian intelligence is an ongoing program. In 1977 the Agency was undergoing radical cutbacks under then-DCI Adm. Stansfield Turner.
Former senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky said the “KGB’s main targets within the diffuse American intelligence community were the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency,” but they “took an increasing interest in the Defense Intelligence Agency” in the early 1980s.2 In 1995 Fox News reported that the FBI was “investigating hundreds of espionage cases in the United States, targeting present and former employees of almost all intelligence agencies.”
In view of the fact that CIA had been gouged by Congress and purged by DCI Turner, did Soviet intelligence sense that CIA active or former officers were vulnerable as recruitment targets? As one reporter wrote, “The bottom line is that since the days of President Carter, the CIA has been crippled by an over-demanding and over-inquisitive Congress, which set rules, demanded standards and seemed to forget that the dirty game of espionage is as vital to a nation’s survival as strategic weapons.”3 Rep. Robert Livingston (R-Louisiana), a member of the House Intelligence Committee in 1989, noted the effect of Turner’s cutbacks by saying that “the CIA clandestine service has not recovered from the 1970s, when then-CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner ‘decimated’ CIA human-intelligence capabilities during the Carter Administration by dismissing about 800 experienced CIA officers.”
In 1994 the United States enjoyed improved political relations with Russia, and many Americans believed Russians were now our friends, but they had cold water dumped on their jubilation with the announcement of the arrest of CIA employee Aldrich “Rick” Ames for spying for the Soviets/Russians since 1985. Little did most Americans know that at this same time Russian intelligence leaders directed their officers to accelerate efforts to target and recruit new sources, especially Americans. The Russians knew they now had a golden opportunity to continue their string of success; they had FBI supervisor Earl Pitts spy for them from 1987 to 1992, former CIA station chief Harold Nicholson from 1994 to 1995, and Robert Hanssen, an FBI special agent who was as valuable as Ames, providing them with identities of American sources and information on FBI agents and new CIA case officers.
Americans need to temper any feeling of exhilaration when the press writes glowing stories about improved world situations or that espionage or terrorism is retreating. It’s never the case. The war in the intelligence trenches never ceases. Americans need to remember that the other side may have a hidden agenda or may be using subterfuge to gain some political or economic advantage.
In the repercussions following the Ames arrest, Russian intelligence increased its efforts in 1995 to recruit CIA intelligence officers in order to capitalize on the adverse environment the Agency faced from the daily onslaught by the press and Congress. In the spring of 1995 Russian intelligence headquarters advised its officers worldwide that the impact of a new CIA director may have a serious effect on officers’ morale, and that Russian officers were to intensify developmental efforts against CIA officers on a high priority basis. Particular attention was to be given to mid-level and junior CIA officers who were disillusioned or subject to termination without pensions. Their offices were instructed to review procedures for handling walk-ins or volunteers who contacted Russian missions or officers.
Without a doubt, when CIA has faced or will face sweeping changes, bad press, congressional investigations, and/or low morale, Russian intelligence will be there to capitalize on the situation by intensifying its recruitment efforts. It was perhaps not coincidental that in the spring of 1975 the DDO also noted the intensified efforts by the KGB and other anti-Agency elements to exploit CIA discomfiture. There appeared to be a worldwide campaign to expose CIA personnel stationed abroad. The seriousness of this campaign was underlined by the assassination of Richard Welch, chief of staff in Athens, on December 23, 1975. Welch’s then-unresolved murder made a strong impact on the Agency’s leadership and strengthened CIA’s resolution to move forward once more against the external enemies of the United States.
By this time the damage had been done. During a lecture on the history of CI that I gave to a Defense Security Service training class, I remarked that the 1974 congressional investigating committees really did not accomplish anything except to hinder CIA’s capability. Brett Snider, who was the next speaker, had arrived early and sat in on my lecture. Afterward, Snider disagreed with my comment, saying that Congress eventually passed legislation creating the two intelligence oversight committees. The basic fact remains that despite the entire congressional and media furor in 1974 and 1975, “the Congress itself legislated no changes, but did give political backing to a set of insiders who implemented their agenda and thoroughly purged their opponents whom they labeled enemies of civil liberties. By 1980 over three-fourths of the CIA’s roughly 400 officers of range GS16 through 18 had not held that rank four years before, and virtually no one who had been in senior positions prior to 1975 remained in place; except for the winners in the internecine battles.”4
Many people in this country feel that this was a necessary answer to maintain control over the intelligence community. Yet twenty-five years later, these committees deteriorated into political battlegrounds. A staffer of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) recommended using an investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a means to gain political advantage and damage the reelection chances of President George W. Bush. Instead of firing this staffer for the blatant suggestion of using the Senate oversight committee in such a way, the Democrats rushed to the defense.
In 2003 officers were facing doubts and struggling with what appear to be sometimes conflicting trends and demands on one hand, and lack of direction on the other. Young, first-tour officers left because they did not know what was expected of them. This is not a new phenomenon, as young officers have been leaving at an alarming rate for several years. For example, CIA admitted in 1997 to a disproportionate number of resignations of its younger staff in the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine arm—twelve have gone recently from the Far Eastern Division alone. I knew of one officer who had developed a hard-target individual for recruitment. After spending his energy and talents preparing the individual to be pitched to work for CIA, the officer’s superiors at headquarters rejected approving the operational proposal to recruit this individual. Outraged by the lack of intestinal fortitude by his superiors to take a risk, the officer submitted his resignation. Before the officer left, the DDO called him to his office to try to convince him to stay in the Agency, saying that things were going to change. He left and took a job as a “headhunter.”
CIA leadership remained rather smugly self-satisfied that their local resources had been harnessed to get in front of the intelligence requirements for this changing world—counterintelligence and terrorism targets, increased resources on the Soviet and East European targets, emphasis on narcotics and European strategy issues, high tech and tech transfer matters, weapons of mass destruction, and biochemical and nuclear warfare. While DCI George Tenet bounced a basketball in the corridor of CIA’s seventh floor to improve morale, the Agency continued to be lost in its own “Wilderness of Mirrors.” It became risk avoidance rather than a risk-taking spy and analysis service.
CIA had done studies on future threats, and had outside experts in to discuss future trends, but it seems that instead of looking forward on how to deal with these threats, CIA merely rode the latest trend. While the Agency dedicated personnel who constantly identify intelligence gaps that need focus, most senior operations officers are bogged down in endless meetings (which drag on because of poor planning), try to remain case officers instead of being managers, and handle routine office work. Efforts were previously made to push decisionmaking to mid-level officers, but as usual the senior officers were not supportive because of the fear that they would lose control and the need to protect their turf.
To keep our nation free and protected, CIA must know what’s occurring in every country, whether the United States has a presence there or not. CIA must have the infrastructure in place to deal with any surge of policy interest when a country moves toward a crisis situation that may or may not involve us. In the mid-1990s CIA closed several of its field stations because of budget pressures and had a difficult time trying to resurrect terminated agents. This does not mean only recruited assets providing information from various government, business, scientific, or academia entities, but also information from the street—what is the talk in the bazaars, cafes, mosques, watering holes, or other places where average citizens gather. The same goes for those countries considered hostile to the United States.
CIA must be able to carry out “covert activities” on behalf of the president. Many liberals have a phobia of covert action, but it is a necessary supplement to intelligence operations. Despite CIA’s past successes and failures in this area, the need for political action/influence and paramilitary capabilities is another major weapon in the U.S. arsenal. As many problems as this responsibility has caused CIA through the years with Congress, the press, and some liberals, it is the ability to conduct covert action operations that has given the Agency its muscle and access to important world power centers. CIA needs to work with the president and Congress to relax the existing ground rules covering covert action. Congress must stop treating this capability as a puppet to be pulled and yanked with every changing of the guard. Regardless of the outcome, CIA’s covert action capabilities need to be maintained and strengthened where possible.
Ever since CIA officer Aldrich Ames was discovered to be a Russian spy within the Agency, there have been calls for abolishing or dismantling the Agency. The Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community, known as the Aspin Commission,5 was considering whether CIA should be maintained as a separate organization, or whether its functions should be spread to other agencies and CIA abolished.
After the United States bombed the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo, Rep. Major R. Owens (D-New York) rose on the floor of the House and stated, “I certainly do not think we should trust the CIA to do our targeting for us if they do not have good maps and cannot discern an embassy building that has been there for some time. They say they had people on the ground who double-checked that site as well as whatever we are using in terms of satellite guidance of our bombing attacks. There is no excuse for that.” Owens went on to say,
They have Aldrich Ames who was in charge of the counteroffensive against the Russian spy agency, and we found that Aldrich Ames was on the payroll of the Russians. And at least 10 of our agents were executed as a result of Aldrich Ames sitting there as the head of the CIA counterspy operation against Russia. We had other people who defected from various positions who showed that the CIA is quite a shabby organization. Why the President has not dismantled the present CIA and reorganized it totally, I do not know.6
Congress must also cease its constant interference with intelligence programs and activities. CIA cannot have 535 directors (435 in the House and 100 in the Senate) trying to dictate what the Agency should or should not do. Since the establishment of the permanent committees on intelligence in the House and Senate, Congress has annually passed authorization bills that contain permanent statutory provisions, all designed to enhance congressional control. This has led to efforts by CIA to address particular world problems as merely an effort to address congressional needs. It has been this interference that has effectively damaged initiative, risk-taking, and the can-do attitude that were hallmarks of operation officers and analysts. Whenever some catastrophe occurs, Congress rises like a huge fire-spitting dragon, ready to scald those responsible for another “intelligence” or “CI failure.”
Public hearings are held and the press has a field day covering all the finger-pointing, the innuendos, the charges and counter-charges, the verbal assaults by so-called experts, and then finally the closed-door hearing to get a “classified briefing” by CIA managers. The only thing coming from these briefings is generally more negative sound-bites for the television cameras from our “honorable senators and representatives.” The public perception is that CIA has failed again. All this microscopic scrutiny has led CIA to withdraw into a shell to avoid any further scrutiny, not as an act of cowardice but of self-preservation. If Congress wants to find the guilty party, it need only to look in a mirror.
In the days of the antiwar protests and black militancy, the White House was pervaded by a sense of crisis in the nation. Neither President Johnson nor President Nixon could know the extent of the damage each would cause, not only to counterintelligence but also to CIA’s DDO, in the years to come by their efforts to control domestic opposition to the Vietnam War. “America’s top intelligence organization will never be the same again,” was the first line of a U.S. News & World Report article in January 1975.7 The argument that ran through the Church Committee hearings was that the United States had more to fear from a surfeit of intelligence than from external threats. The legislative prescription was a bill (S-2525) to charter U.S. intelligence. It was supported by a coalition of left-wing politicians in Congress and intelligence officials who had won the battles of the 1970s. Both the agencies’ new orientation and the bill that would have codified them were essentially oriented inward. Neither was meant primarily to deal with a fast-changing world.8

Damage to Counterintelligence

On June 18, 1975, Colby addressed Agency employees in “The Bubble,” as CIA’s auditorium is affectionately known. After his remarks, he was asked about his prognosis of the future of CIA’s capability to conduct clandestine operations. Colby replied that he was optimistic. He believed that when the investigations were complete and when Agency managers decided what CIA would do in the future and how it would be done, then CIA would be allowed to return to work either next year or the year after. This was truly a sad commentary on how CIA was being damaged in the process. Imagine the same situation today, if you will, of CIA being stymied in its intelligence gathering for one to two years when Al Qaida is out there plotting attacks on the United States.
After a lifetime in the intelligence field, Colby appeared proud to admit that he “could just not figure out at all” what his own CI staff was doing.9 As a put-down of Angleton, a veteran CIA senior officer off-handedly rejected sixty years of Soviet intelligence deception operations as “sheer nonsense,” a sort of paranoid fantasy, and unabashedly admitted, “I don’t have to be able to share this kind of thing.”10
The storm of public criticism that befell CI staff had a ripple effect within CIA. There was a dislike for counterintelligence because operational officers saw it as an obstacle to its information gathering. “CIA is not primarily out there to contest the KGB,” said Colby. “It’s got a much more important job, which is to find out what’s going on at the political and strategic levels of foreign thinking and Soviet thinking.”11
In contrast, Helms, speaking on the same occasion, remarked, “Any secret organization must necessarily focus both on the recruitment of foreign agents and on CI methods, which constantly scrutinize the reliability of agents abroad and protect us against espionage agents at home.” Helms further said, “The theory that counterintelligence can just be tucked away in a back room in a world dominated by KGB and other hostile agents is simply naïve.”
Although Helms was a defender of counterintelligence, the predominant view within the senior ranks was illustrated by several agency officers. A former head of CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, conveniently forgetting how often the KGB victimized his division, resented what he called the “counterintelligence clique” and “high priesthood of secrecy.” Another CIA executive made clear his disdain of CI when he said it was “little more than operations for operations sake.” Other operations officers dismissed CI’s brand of caution as “paranoia,” and accused the staff of perpetrating a “myth of the omnipotent KGB” and “suspecting every defector to be a deception agent.”12 Joseph B. Smith, an experienced case officer who specialized in propaganda operations, called counterintelligence “paranoia made systematic by a card index.”13
Colby’s thinking is what triggers the disparagement of those within the intelligence profession who worry about CIA being penetrated. His thinking and the thinking of those who feared and disliked Angleton, never wanting another “Angleton” to run counterintelligence, had an immediate and continuously disastrous effect on counterintelligence within CIA. As an organization, CIA forgot the CI lessons learned by transferring, or “retiring,” a few of the staff’s veterans, as Colby did after Angleton’s ouster. In one press commentary it was said, “Intelligence experts here say dismantling the top echelons of Angleton’s operations alone will prove priceless to the Soviet KGB and immensely costly to the United States. CIA’s credibility as a tight ship—vital to every aspect of its work—has been grievously undermined.”14
The staff was severely impacted by personnel turbulence. The departure of Angleton and three of his top staff officers—Deputy Chief Ray Rocca, Executive Officer William Hood, and Chief of Operations N. Scott Miler—wiped out the collective memory and experience gained over a lifetime. Ober was moved to the National Security Council and later to the Studies of Intelligence Staff. High retirement rates and other factors resulted in a further loss of CI experience. CI staff jobs in CIA were viewed as dead-end assignments. Innovative thinking and decision-making ability among this cadre significantly declined. Commenting on Angleton’s dismissal, former acting DCI Hank Knoche said in 1978, “There is no counterintelligence anymore.”15
The environment within the general public, and especially so in the media and Congress, was increasingly hostile toward counterintelligence. The changing mores of society and the erosion of confidence in governmental integrity had a corrosive effect. The resulting public distrust seriously undermined CI effectiveness. Our measures and our standards were viewed as excessive, repressive, and unnecessary. At the same time our capability was being reduced and the number and sensitivity of unauthorized disclosures increased, the military, political, and economic clout of hostile powers continued to grow. So we were locked into a frustrating paradox: our capability provided the bulk of our countermeasures against our principal adversary, the Soviets; yet the climate of the times was hostile and continued to be hostile to CI measures, which were vital for the continued viability of this precious national resource.
Colby next decimated the staff by moving some of its activities to the operating divisions and CIA stations abroad. In effect, the staff was reduced to three branches to concentrate on three specific areas. One branch was to conduct communications intelligence (COMINT) research, the second branch was charged with running [CIA CENSORED] operations against hostile foreign intelligence services, and branch three had the job of conducting [CIA CENSORED] operations using leads from sensitive sources.
The changes within the staff, according to official pronouncements, was initiated because the DDO’s CI program, centered in the staff, had over the years become increasingly divorced from the mainstream of the directorate’s operational activity. The staff was viewed as manned by inferior individuals who lived sheltered lives, locked inside their cubbyholes reading ancient manuscripts. The former staff’s research efforts were judged as concentrating on outdated material that was increasingly irrelevant to the current needs and requirements of a modern spy agency. To senior DDO managers, the staff’s hard work was predisposed to expand elaborate hypotheses, which were largely unsupported by facts and divorced from the operational realities from which the staff had insulated itself.
But Colby went further to cut down counterintelligence. At that time every DDO officer was home-based in a particular division or staff. For example, as a CI officer I was designated as such by the abbreviation CI. An operations officer in the Far East (now East Asia) Division was designated an FE (now EA) officer. Under Colby, the home-based designations associated with CI, FI, and covert action (CA) became obsolete.
In February 1974 the career management staff (CMS) advised all DDO staffs and division chiefs that the DDO’s Personnel Development Board decided that it was beneficial to the DDO to avoid establishing any new home-base designations with specific reference to the separate six staff elements, one of which was counterintelligence. CMS chief Gordon Mason advised the divisions that he would be discussing the feasibility of converting those employees within their command jurisdiction who were in obsolete home-base designations to an appropriate division designation. While this process was happening, anyone with an obsolete home-base designation was to be temporarily converted to an “STF” (Staff) until that officer rotated to an area division and was assigned that division’s designation. In effect, Colby was seeking to destroy any chance that an experienced CI officer would climb through the ranks and become another Angleton.
To succeed Angleton, Colby selected George Kalaris, who reorganized the staff and brought in new DDO officers. He did so because he felt that the previous leadership under Angleton had over the years become increasingly divorced from the mainstream of DDO operational activity. He viewed Angleton’s staff’s research efforts as tending to concentrate on outdated material. One of the outdated materials was the Okhrana (Russian Imperial Police) file held by the Hoover Institute. CI staff apparently believed these files would yield new insights into Moscow’s Soviet-era operations. Some at CIA challenged this notion, claiming that the KGB was a qualitatively new organization employing a different tradecraft. Years later, former KGB officers Oleg Gordievsky and Oleg Kalugin asserted that the KGB had used Okhrana manuals in training and lecture courses when they were KGB trainees in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kalugin claims that use of Okhrana materials continued into the 1980s.16
When Kalaris retired in 1977, Hugh Tovar replaced him. In my own personal experience within the staff, during this period I never had the impression that we were progressing. I always felt like Tovar was the captain of a ship going nowhere. It should also be noted that both men were lawyers and managers with very little or no CI experience.
In 1975 the chief of CI operations viewed CIA as being in a weak position, since there was no cadre of young officers that he could see coming up to replace the older ones in the CI field. He said that he was extremely concerned about the gap this would leave in the Agency’s position, saying that he sometimes felt he was the only one who cared about the loss of counterintelligence as an Agency function. Another CI operations section chief agreed, pointing out that despite the efforts of a number of people in CI operations, they had been unable to develop appropriate CI training in Agency training courses; that counterintelligence seemed to have had a great deal of difficulty in attracting younger officers to careers or even tours in the former staff; and that things were not getting any easier in the light of the congressional and media publicity.

CI under DCI Stansfield Turner

Former DCI Stansfield Turner did not see any problems with the new CI team in CIA. “Since Angleton’s departure, we have uncovered Boyce [Christopher J.] and Lee [Andrew D.], Truong [Dinh Hung], and Barnett [David Henry] rather quickly after they became traitors, and that is a reasonable indication that our counterintelligence is working.... I am convinced, however, that the Counterintelligence Staff under Kalaris and his successors reached a very high level of performance.”17
Turner’s citing of these espionage cases amply illustrates his rather sophomoric view of counterintelligence. Contrary to his view, counterintelligence had nothing to do with the Boyce and Lee case. On January 6, 1977, police in Mexico City arrested Lee, who had been observed throwing an object into the Russian Embassy compound. When arrested, Lee had in his possession three rolls of microfilm containing photographs of top secret U.S. documents, which he stated he intended to pass to the Russians. He claimed to have obtained them from Boyce, an employee of TRW Inc., a U.S. firm having contracts with various U.S. government agencies. Ten days after Lee’s arrest, the FBI arrested Boyce and charged him with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Russians. What Turner forgot to say was that the alienation of a vast majority of people from the Vietnam/Watergate era had lowered moral barriers to espionage. For example, Boyce claimed that alienation from the government facilitated his decision to work for the Soviets. He blamed Vietnam for much of his disaffection.
Humphrey, a former USIA employee, passed classified message traffic to a Vietnamese expatriate. He became involved in this activity in an effort to secure freedom for a woman who was stranded in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to sixteen years in prison. His motivation was coercion and he worked from 1976 to 1977.
David Henry Barnett was a former CIA officer (1958–70) who volunteered his services to the KGB in Indonesia. In February 1978 CIA received information from a sensitive source concerning Barnett’s KGB contacts. Former KGB major general Kalugin said a KGB officer in Indonesia compromised Barnett to CIA.18 The KGB officer who provided this information had to be Vladimir Piguzov (code name GTJOGGER), a lieutenant colonel stationed in Indonesia. He, in turn, was compromised by Aldrich Ames and executed. As a CIA source within Soviet intelligence, CIA’s Soviet Division, not the CI staff, would have passed the source’s reporting to the FBI.
I guess Turner forgot that in 1978 he let it be known that Agency officers were not taking their CI jobs seriously enough, and that CIA on the whole should be doing a better job in counterintelligence. Both Turner and the DDO, John McMahon, made it clear they wanted a more involved CI staff, active and concerned with everything. Turner knew nothing of counterintelligence before becoming CIA director and left knowing nothing. The only thing he could say was to perpetuate the oft-repeated words of Angleton’s sins.
Sam Halpern, who served for thirty-two years in CIA, said that Turner took “a simplistic approach to Counterintelligence,” which Turner defined as the job “to find those Americans who do become agents of a foreign power.” Halpern added that at least Turner should have consulted his own intelligence community staff’s “Glossary of Intelligence Terms and Definitions,” which defined foreign CI as “intelligence activity, with its resultant product, intended to detect, counteract, and/or prevent espionage and other clandestine intelligence activities, sabotage, international terrorist activities, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations or persons.”19
Turner’s and McMahon’s comments gave CI staff chief Blee authorization for counterintelligence to again become involved in DDO operations. Not only did Blee have senior management’s blessing to take on the division chiefs, but he also had the seniority to do so. The only problem he faced was with a few “old-timers” on his staff who wanted the staff converted to a division. Blee quickly rejected their suggestion because he felt counterintelligence as a division would be one among several equals, while as a staff chief he was at a higher level and directly served the DDO.
Turner was out of his league as DCI. When he was appointed, Turner saw his mission as one of “putting the CIA’s much criticized past behind us.” Though he used the term “us,” Turner was never accepted into the intelligence community by its members. Many of the operations officers did not like Turner because he took a meat axe to the directorate, firing several hundred employees. In his book, Turner justified his actions by saying he was just carrying out a mid-1976 study by DCI George H.W. Bush, which recommended cutting 1,350 positions in the DDO. Turner said he only slashed seventeen people, while 147 took forced early retirement and the other 656 positions were eliminated through attrition. Turner’s actions caused such turmoil within the ranks of the operations officers that morale plummeted to new lows as everyone waited for the axe to fall. One of my colleagues was so anxious he could not focus on his job. He knew that he would be on the list because he was an eccentric person whose foibles sometimes grated on senior officials. He did receive his notice, but luckily I had told him to contact a woman with whom we had previously worked to see if she could help. She had married a senior official in the DDI, and through her he was able to secure a vacant position in that directorate. Others were not so blessed.
The turmoil in CIA that Turner generated was so great that President Reagan’s transition team looking at CIA wrote a report that slammed the Agency for the way it conducted business. The report recommended the president divide CIA “into several bodies, and proposed to fire everyone in CIA above the grade of GS-14 as complicit with the failed Carter-Turner policies.”20
The new people being sent to the staff were short-timers who were to serve a rotational tour of two or three years. The new staffers were either not interested in counterintelligence or so loaded with tasks by the new management that they had no time to read or review the old files that were being called “ancient history.” To illustrate this point, the CI staff, like all other divisions within CIA, held weekly staff meetings unless most senior managers were going to be absent that day. After Blee took over as chief, junior officers from various sections were usually invited to sit as back-benchers, as a way of learning what was occurring within the staff and what issues were current. For several staff meetings in a row, Blee and his office chiefs had been discussing past CI issues and studies in which the “Monster Plot” had been raised. At one of these meetings Blee stopped and addressed the junior officers. He wanted to know why none of them contributed to the discussion on the “Monster Plot.”
One junior officer immediately responded that he might have something to say if he knew what the “Monster Plot” was. Blee then asked if any of the junior officers had ever read Angleton’s theory, to which everyone replied no. Blee told his senior managers to make a copy available to them. Blee was serious about his desire to circulate Angleton’s magnum opus, but it never was. Several junior officers commented that they never saw the document, despite Blee’s comments to his managers. His managers knew that Blee would be occupied with other more pressing issues as chief, and therefore they probably ignored his orders to make the “Monster Plot” available.

The Case of Edward Howard

To provide another example of how counterintelligence was ignored we will examine the deficiencies in the Personnel Evaluation Board (PEB) process on former CIA officer Edward Howard, who defected to the Soviet Union. The chief of the CI staff was not asked to attend the meeting, nor was he notified of it. The former Chief of the Soviet/East European Division did not clearly inform the PEB that Howard had had access to and specialized training for handling some of the Agency’s most sensitive human and technical operations in the USSR. Thus, though the board addressed the CI risk, it did so ignorant of what precisely was at risk. Howard’s final polygraph was on a Friday, and the PEB met on the following Monday with little or no advance knowledge of what was on the agenda. Howard was given no chance to defend himself on Tuesday, and he was told to resign or be fired. A recommendation was later made that the DCI should order the director of the office of personnel to include the CI chief or his designated rep as a permanent member of the PEB, and to make CI risk assessment a fixed item on the board’s agenda whenever it contemplated serious adverse action against an Agency employee.
CIA briefed the FBI on Howard on August 2, 1985. Adjudged too late in the period between May 3, 1983 (the date Howard was advised of PEB’s termination decision) and August 2, 1985, there were signs of systemic failure on CIA’s part: inattention to red flags in the CI context, failure to share information within the Agency, absence of a collegial mechanism to address the CI problem, and reluctance to share information with and surrender jurisdiction to the FBI.
Turning to the FBI in late spring 1983 would have entailed admitted risks. CIA might have been required to divulge to the FBI more than it wanted to about Howard’s compartmented knowledge, and there was the possibility that the FBI, by interviewing or surveillance of Howard, might precipitate harmful action on his part. Neither of these risks appeared to justify the two-year delay in addressing the real risk. The overall impression of the period following May 3, 1983, was that nobody was in charge.
The Howard case raised several issues in 1985, including why CIA failed to report to the FBI Howard’s actions and remarks in 1983 and 1984 that raised the possibility of his going to the Soviets. Justice Department and FBI officials have stated that this information would have provided a basis for a preliminary FBI CI inquiry that could have included a check of travel records. CIA CI and security personnel failed to ensure that top officials in all its divisions were familiar with FBI CI guidelines and policies.
A second issue is why the FBI surveillance coverage of Howard failed to prevent his escape. Although the FBI indicated that the proximate cause was human error by surveillance personnel, Justice and FBI officials also cited legal concerns about the harassment of Howard. The FBI and Justice did not review their current policies regarding physical surveillance and the advisability of authorizing lawful enhanced surveillance when there was reason to believe a CI suspect might flee the country. FBI and Justice delays in opening an investigation of Howard and securing surveillance orders are especially troubling.
After Howard eluded the FBI in September 1985, President Regan directed the PFIAB to review and assess whether U.S. CI capabilities were sufficient to protect government secrets and personnel. The PFIAB delivered its final report to the president on April 30, 1986.
The PFIAB report indicated that there was a serious flaw in the way both the FBI and CIA shared CI-related information. The PFIAB recommended the president direct CIA and the FBI to carry out a comprehensive joint assessment of their mechanisms for coordinating on CI matters. The PFIAB made several other recommendations, including a “serious” review on whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was an adequate mechanism for effective CI investigations, and whether the FBI should be authorized to routinely open mail addressed to the Soviet and other hostile foreign diplomatic missions in the United States.
As an old and experienced Office of Strategic Services officer, DCI Casey was shocked by how the Directorate of Operations (DO) handled the Howard investigation. He sent off a blistering memo to the DDO, in which he said he held both the DDO (Clair George) and the Soviet Division chief (Burton Gerber) responsible for the mess, and that both men should be censured for their failures. Casey make it clear that he wanted the DDO to tell his division and staff managers that they had to be more attentive to possible CI cases.
It is particularly noteworthy that Casey warned the DDO about complacency in its officer corps regarding the penetration of the Agency, particularly in the recruitment of an operations officer. Casey wanted a shift in the DO’s attitude toward counterintelligence, and any DO officer who suspected the Agency was penetrated was responsible for immediately reporting his/her suspicions to the director of security, CI chief, and the inspector general, if appropriate. Casey underscored his seriousness by adding that if the security and CI chiefs did not take any action, the DO officer was to take the matter higher, either to the DDO, the DDCI, or to Casey himself.
Casey concluded his memo to the DDO by reminding him that “invaluable operations have been compromised and at least one life was lost as a result of the gross mishandling of this case. Deficiencies in process, organization and attitude that contributed to this catastrophe must be corrected and I hold you personally responsible to do so.” Despite Casey’s anger about the way the operations directorate dealt with the Howard case, his admonitions to the DO did not appear to have significantly affected the efforts to resolve the 1985 compromises.
From the mid-1980s until the early 1990s, there were numerous studies and reports written by PFIAB, CIA’s inspector general, the congressional oversight committees, and others regarding the shabby state of affairs in CIA’s CI and security offices. Boiled down, these studies acknowledged five major deficiencies.
In reaction to the Church and Pike Committees’ castration of CIA, the pendulum swung too far in the mid-to-late 1970s in the direction of de-emphasizing and decentralizing the Agency’s CI mission. While dedicated CI professionals continued to perform as best they could in this atmosphere, the organization as a whole did not pay sufficient attention to CI issues in running foreign intelligence operations. This neglect of CI functions by the U.S. intelligence community in the 1970s laid the groundwork for the espionage and operational security problems that surfaced in the 1980s.
The discovery of major spy cases, especially during the “Year of the Spy” (1985), and the revelation by a defector in 1987 that Cuba had run a highly successful double-agent program against CIA were the key events drawing attention to the need for a more vigorous CI program. Subsequently, with the collapse of East Germany, we learned that most of the East German assets run by U.S. intelligence agencies had been under hostile control, underscoring the importance of having a consolidated, interdirectorate CI unit.
On March 22, 1988, the DCI directed a reorganization of counterintelligence within the Agency through the creation of the Counterintelligence Center (CIC). The creation of the CIC reflected recognition that CI work needed to be upgraded in terms of status, resources, and influence. DCI William Webster was convinced that a single, Agency-wide organization of CI resources would enhance the quality of the overall CI effort, as well as improve the planning, coordination, management, and effectiveness of CI activities within the Agency and the intelligence community. In 1989 DCI Webster designated all CIA centers, including CIC, as DCI Centers. Gus Hathaway, who was CI staff chief, stayed on as the new CIC chief. This meant that Hathaway also served as the special assistant to the DCI for CI. Ted Price was brought in to run CIC’s day-to-day activities.
It was easy for DCI Webster to sign a memorandum creating CIC; it was another thing to decide the mission of the new center. Hathaway was no fan of Angleton. He once took me to one of his lectures on counterintelligence before a visiting audience within CIA, in which he derided Angleton’s paranoia and secrecy and the way he conducted counterintelligence by surrounding himself with a coterie of trusted devotees. As I sat listening to Hathaway, I saw Angleton somewhat incarnate in Hathaway in the way both men operated, although they were very distinct in appearance. Angleton was a gaunt, weak, chain-smoking figure, while Hathaway was a short, fair-haired, no-nonsense type, but both were workaholics, and Hathaway also surrounded himself with trusted lieutenants.
Price, likewise, had his own way of doing things. He was always the expert and tried to run the center his way, but several times he ran afoul of Hathaway, who would reverse Price’s decisions. Price felt he was brought in with promises of moving up and was chomping at the bit to do so. The one thing they definitely had in common was their disdain for Angleton. The key challenge both faced was how to achieve a balanced perspective in counterintelligence.
They felt that they had to walk a fine line between too little attention to counterintelligence, which would result in operational failures, and too much attention, which they believed would paralyze operational initiative. What neither was willing to do was to ignore counterintelligence completely; after all, they were running the shop and failure meant CIA agents could be compromised or turned against us. At the other end of this spectrum, they were not about to let counterintelligence dominate completely, which they both believed would mean CIA would be without any agents because the bona fides of all recruitments would be suspect.
They decided that the center’s mission would be to conduct and support the full range of CI functions. This meant offensive as well as defensive components. In the offensive realm, this meant supporting the military and the FBI’s plans, through the Agency’s coordination process, for double-agent operations abroad and acting as ombudsman between the military and FBI efforts and the whims and prerogatives of CIA’s various division and station chiefs.
In the defensive role, this meant better analyzing of espionage cases for lessons learned, understanding the array of internal security techniques and activities conducted by various countries that could jeopardize our operations, determining if a “profile” of a spy could be devised that would help in identifying traitors, and improving CI investigations. This latter obviously failed miserably.
Next the Operations Directorate said it would move to make counterintelligence a specialty in which a case officer could choose to concentrate and to enhance promotion opportunities for generalist case officers to have CI achievements and experience. This increased emphasis upon CI recruitments in the directorate’s operational directives was supposed to make counterintelligence a more desirable career path than it had been in many years.
It needs to be emphasized at this point that counterintelligence is not CIA’s main function. Its primary task is collection and analysis of political, economic, and military intelligence. This is one reason why there has been less specialized training and fewer incentives for careers in counterintelligence. Personnel are recruited for intelligence positions generally and are usually not assigned to counterintelligence until they have gained experience in other fields. The belief within CIA was and still is that personnel can develop their basic intelligence skills in less sensitive areas before taking on important CI duties. This conviction discouraged specialization and career advancement in counterintelligence because of CIA’s emphasis on positive intelligence collection.
During the three decades from 1960 to 1990 there was a sharp rise in the number of espionage cases. In the 1960s there were twenty-six cases, in the 1970s there were forty, and the 1980s saw seventy-nine cases. A partial explanation could be attributed to the CI community’s expanded use of electronic techniques and false-flag operations, and wider media exposure from legal changes that allowed the Justice Department greater latitude in using collected espionage evidence and better protection for classified information used in the courtroom. The major causes for the increasing number of Americans selling out their country were a growing materialism within U.S. society, a declining respect for government following the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the sensationalism of spy cases by the press (which planted the seeds for an alternate way of obtaining money), technological advances that made it easier to spy, and the government and businesses devoting fewer resources to applicant screening and employee reinvestigations.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) saw these spy cases differently. The SSCI investigation exposed spy cases in 1986 said the U.S. government still has a totally inadequate CI program to combat expanding hostile intelligence operations against us. In other words, the current system wouldn’t begin to meet the U.S. need for CI in the 1990s. First, the United States entered the 1990s with its intelligence system—sources and methods—largely known to hostile services. “American CI also carried into the 1990s a heritage of unsound practices, bad habits, and lack of CI data base difficult to overcome.”21
During the Cold War, CI agencies and offices throughout the intelligence community and military services had the luxury of concentrating their resources against constant, belligerent, identifiable foes, particularly the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War brought with it a rapidly changing and realigning world order, resulting in new sets of intelligence and CI priorities requiring flexibility in meeting these new challenges and a different approach to counterintelligence. The professional CI officer now faced a constantly changing global environment with respect to international politics, world order, struggle with economic and technological superiority or survivability, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the reality of a multifaceted espionage threat. All this meant that the CI mission became more complicated and required sustained support and recognition from senior intelligence managers, which it failed to obtain.
What it has, and always had, to contend with since the Angleton days is the continued disdain for counterintelligence by senior Agency management. One chief of station more or less told headquarters to stick their CI questions in their collective ear, because “he knew more” than the people at Langley about his situation and he “resented your quarterbacking from Headquarters.” Many of his so-called agents were not bona fide agents, but by the time this fact became proven, the chief had moved on or retired. The division chief naturally backed his station chief, rather than the CI officer.
The year 1991 was a watershed period. The Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall was demolished. East and West Germany were reunified. A coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev failed. The Soviet Union imploded. All these occurrences nudged the established American outlook away from old Cold War realities and created the perception that the new Russia was our friend. People became convinced that the foreign intelligence threat to the United States no longer existed or, if it did, was greatly reduced. However, a series of events proved that the truth was much different from the perception.

The Ames Case

CIA was quite proud of its belief that it had weathered this series of fundamental changes in the world political landscape and survived the budget cutbacks and downsizing that accompanied the U.S. euphoria of winning the Cold War. The Agency focused on its basic mission, refined its targeting, and made what its leaders considered to be necessary organizational adjustments. Pride indeed cometh before a fall, and CIA suffered one of its worst disasters when the Aldrich Ames spy case hit.
The smug attitude that CIA developed was overwhelmed by a crisis of confidence in the Agency’s leadership. The close examination of the Ames debacle by Congress and the Agency’s own inspector general showed that there was a substantial weakness in CIA’s CI posture and Agency personnel management. Accountability, integrity, and discipline had eroded within the ranks of the officer corps. SSCI chairman Dennis DeConcini said, “As for CIA counterintelligence and security, it’s very clear that it is broken out there badly and needs to be fixed, and [CIA Director R. James] Woolsey hasn’t done anything to fix the problem.”22
DCI Woolsey appeared before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on October 5, 1994, and before the SSCI on October 6, 1994, to describe progress on changes under way at CIA. With reference to counterintelligence, Woolsey said it “must never again be seen as an adjunct of our work, it must be an integral part of it.” He informed both committees of steps he had undertaken to restructure and strengthen counterintelligence. He declared that he established the position of special assistant for CI and security and ordered mandatory CI training for all CIA employees. He also ordered additional specialized CI training for DO officers, both at the entry level and at mid-career points, and that CI issues be part of management training courses so managers would be alert to personnel suitability problems before they might become security issues. Lastly, he wanted the CI performance evaluation of CIA offices overseas expanded to cover more officers and more frequent evaluations.
The only problem with Woolsey’s grand CI training program was it did not work. There were not adequate CI officers with the expertise to take on such a massive endeavor. Instead, CIA began to recruit officers from various directorates to be “counterintelligence trainers,” indoctrinate them with just an adequate amount of knowledge, provided a syllabus to use, and sent them off to begin the training program. There was such a lack of knowledgeable CI officers that CIA even telephoned the National Counterintelligence Center to ask me—I was serving as chief of Counterintelligence Community Training—to provide two officers to help in this training program.
A high percentage of CIC officers attended the program at the time. The program was highly praised for the excellent presentations by various speakers and the wealth of information shared. This program then failed because it was resource intensive, attendance was erratic, speakers were called away for other pressing matters, and sessions were constantly being rescheduled. These two attempts at CI training—one a basic introduction to novices and the other to professional CI officers—amply illustrates why CIA began to use an outside contractor to conduct its basic CI training.
This was not the first time that such a training program had been tried. A few years prior to this program, another initiative took place in 1990–91 to provide officers serving in CIC on long-term rotations a core element of CI knowledge. The center chief, Ted Price, had asked my supervisor and me to prepare a career profile for a CI officer; what assignments at particular grade levels the officer should seek; what training courses to take, including suggestions for new courses; and a list of suggested readings, both classified and unclassified. Price gave our finished profile to an OPM officer who modified our product and produced a slick, bound publication for the center. Others were required to attend a certain number of lectures, seminars, book readings, discussion sessions, and films to be certified as a CI officer. The center’s training group administered the program.
CIA management was desperately trying to weather the raging storm buffeting the very core of the Agency. Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-New York) went so far as to call for the abolishment of CIA. That senior Agency officials were in such disarray is easily recognized in the way that they handled the crisis. Rather than performing the necessary surgery, the initial focus was on the mindset within the CIA that would cause trained intelligence professionals to overlook the telltale signs of espionage that they would otherwise quickly recognize and act upon were they to occur outside the Agency. Attention then shifted to the apparent unwillingness and inability of the CIA hierarchy to take action against those responsible for not having recognized the fact that Ames was spying for the Russians. Then came the bizarre twist of the CIA promoting and conferring medals upon some of the very individuals who had been singled out for failing to detect Ames’ spying.
In the summer of 1994, with Congress and the Executive Branch both demanding an answer to the question “What went wrong?” the collective CI community was itself asking the question “Is this [the new national structure] the right answer?” In searching for answers to both questions, all parties were faced with the same reality of skepticism as to whether the U.S. CI community was structured to effectively and efficiently protect the United States from threats posed by foreign intelligence services.

National Counterintelligence Center Created

Regardless of what conclusions were drawn, President Bill Clinton’s issuing of Presidential Review Directive 44 (PRD-44) and Presidential Decision Directive 24 (PDD-24) directed the creation of a new national CI structure that championed a community-based approach to counterintelligence, under the leadership and guidance of the National Counterintelligence Policy Board (NACIPB), the National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NACOB), and National Counterintelligence Center (NACIC). In the ensuing four-year period, we were told the CI community made significant strides in achieving a more flexible, coordinated, and synergistic effort defending the nation against the myriad foreign intelligence threats it then faced. Empty words created by self-delusion echoed again.
In reality, NACIPB members became frustrated because the board appeared unable to tackle and resolve difficult issues. Instead the board, under chairman Keith Hall (May 1994–June 1995), was inclined toward seeking often-unreachable consensus decisions before issuing policy guidance.23 This frustration increased under Chairwoman Nora Slatkin (June 1995–June 1997) and was directly attributable to the lack of a purposeful executive committee (EXCOM), which the membership felt was essential in order to overcome this sense of stagnation. In 1997 the EXCOM met only once, in June, when new NACIPB chairman John Lewis took command.
Lewis (June 1997–February 1999) tried to energize the EXCOM immediately after his appointment. Lewis, like Hall, firmly believed that the EXCOM was the best method to address priority and substantive CI issues at the national level, and the way to drive issues “from the top down.” After the initial EXCOM meeting, events and the persistent turnover of board principals continuously worked against Lewis’ efforts toward making his vision a reality. By 1998 nothing had changed, and the EXCOM still was not as energized as Hall, Lewis, and some other board members believed it should be.
What’s more, NACIPB members contributed to the eventual breakdown of the new national CI structure. There was a perceived indifference by some principal board members to take their responsibilities seriously by attend meetings in 1997. NCIPB members either skipped meetings or sent their deputies, which resulted in the board being viewed as having regressed to a reactive state, versus the strong, proactive board the CI community envisioned. If the missing members were asked, they would say that the pressure of their regular duties and other commitments were the cause of their absences. These excuses only ran counter to the actual explanation that these truant members did not consider counterintelligence to be that important. It takes a sincere commitment to leave your office and your headquarters building to drive miles to a meeting site, where a session could last two or more hours. These men did not have that commitment.
Concerns were raised over the direction the board was headed, particularly since the board was unable or unwilling to identify and resolve difficult issues facing the CI community and its role in the budget process. The board was weak at developing and proposing national-level policy and directives for the CI community. Although the Board did contribute to legislative initiatives (a charter responsibility), the board itself never reviewed or proposed any legislative initiatives.
Even though new board chairman Lewis got the board moving in the right direction, there was still a perception that the board was mostly a reactive organization. One of the problems was the lack of oversight by the NSC, which did not hold the board accountable for its actions and inhibited the board’s ability to meet its obligation. Key board members still attended meetings haphazardly. Even though the board was to hold monthly meetings, the board actually met only six times in a one-year timeframe. Furthermore, of the nine key board members, only three attended more than half the meetings, while four attended only six and two attended one or fewer. One of the agencies had a vacancy on the board since January 1998.
In February 1999 the new chairman, Neil Gallagher, recognized the board’s shortcomings and felt that it was crucial that the members demonstrate more fortitude and consistency by tackling the hard CI issues and engage in candid discussion toward resolving them. He asked members to do some introspection vis-à-vis their roles. Concerning meetings, Gallagher urged the key members to schedule time for all board meetings. He had confidence that if the members accepted his hypothesis it would strengthen the credibility of the board within the CI community.
NACIPB and the NACOB made some progress by assuming the responsibility for addressing the most critical issues facing the CI community by a willingness to lead by example. Two of the critical issues that needed resolution were Presidential Decision Directive 61 (PDD-61) and CI issues associated with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion.
PDD-61 was an outgrowth of the concern in 1995 that China might have acquired highly sensitive information from American nuclear weapons laboratories in the mid-1980s. In July 1997 the Department of Energy (DOE) briefed senior Clinton administration officials on conclusions it had reached following its assessment of Chinese efforts. Shortly thereafter, the administration created a special NACIPB working group to make recommendations for strengthening lab security. NACIPB’s recommendations, forwarded in September 1997, became the basis for PDD-61, issued in February 1998. In the directive, President Clinton ordered DOE to establish a stronger CI program, which it did by creating an independent Office of Counterintelligence and naming FBI official Ed Curren director. One of Curren’s first acts was to order a comprehensive study of DOE’s CI program.
With the forthcoming admission of former East European nations of the Soviet Bloc into NATO, NACIPB was directed to study proposals for improving NATO CI posture. Included among these proposals would be the creation of a CI unit, possibly within the NATO Office of Security, to be composed of experienced CI investigators from the FBI and European NATO counterpart services. Several NATO countries agreed to join the United States in conducting a “top-down” assessment of the vulnerabilities of NATO, with a goal to establish minimum standards for the conduct of such investigations. The concern was not so much the new NATO members but years of Soviets/Russians targeting NATO personnel and facilities.
NACIC achieved considerable progress on behalf of the entire community. To prepare the community for the twenty-first century, the NACIC conceived the idea of conducting a Counterintelligence Futures Forum (CIFF) for community managers. The first phase resulted in the NACIC publishing a report entitled “Developing a Strategic Concept for U.S. CI Programs in the 21st Century.” Phase two of the CIFF took place during April 1998 and brought together senior representatives from throughout the community who formulated concepts for the implementation of the strategic objectives formulated during phase one. The CIFF process was intended to produce a living plan to focus CI community efforts toward the year 2010. The CIFF embodied the PRD-44 concept of cooperation, integration, and accountability for the future.
There were calls for NACIC to revise its charter to succinctly portray its core activities. The charter identified the center as the national level focal point—not the answer—for the coordination of CI community activities. In previous years, critics complained that the NACIC’s charter was too broad, resulting in the impression that the NACIC should deliver threat assessments and services to anyone in need. The perception of NACIC as being a “one-stop shop” for the CI community resulted in instances of dissatisfaction with the NACIC’s response to the needs and/or requirements levied by CI community entities. One senior CI member disagreed by commenting, “I believe the NACIC is living up to the words of its charter, and as an organization, the NACIC meets more of the words in its charter than most organizations.”
The bottom line according to many experts was that the new CI structure wasn’t working. The reason would be obvious if someone took the time to study it. The NACIPB lacked sufficient CI professionals among its members; there were too many complaints from various agencies (mainly the FBI) about having to respond to NACIC tasking; the State Department representative presented a major bottleneck because State saw most CI solutions as a detriment to diplomatic relations; and there was timidity by board members to tackle the difficult issues. The solution was a new structure called the National Counterintelligence Executive.

Trouble in CIA

In the meantime, several chiefs came and left CIA’s CIC. None were remarkable, but the only common trait each had in common was their lack of CI experience. In fact, the last vacancy notices for senior CI officers I saw before my retirement, including the chief of the CI Center [CIC], did not even list CI experience as a prerequisite for the job. One was an analyst from the DDI who had served a tour in CIC’s analyst section before being named chief.
She was followed by a lawyer, who probably yearned to be an operations officer but was sent to CIC instead. In my opinion, he was the worst CI chief we ever had. His lack of experience was evident, as he outright rejected the idea of using double agents as part of his arsenal against foreign intelligence. I realized that the concept was probably very difficult for him to grasp, seeing that by the time he got there, CIA’s basic coordination role had been given to NACIC. Nevertheless, CIA managed to finagle its way out of giving up one of its responsibilities under DCI directives by having a CIC officer assigned to NACIC handle the Agency’s role. He didn’t last long before being shipped off to another DDO assignment, but here again, I understand, he was in over his head.
In 1999 CIA director George Tenet believed the Agency had “made great strides in counterintelligence” because a partnership with the FBI had been created “in the counterintelligence and counterespionage fields,” and he was “determined” the partnership be made a “permanent way of doing business.” Tenet forgot to say that President Clinton’s executive order in 1994, in addition to creating a national CI structure, also forced CIA to have an FBI special agent in charge of CIC’s investigation branch. But Paul Redmond, a senior Agency CI officer who was instrumental in pushing the Ames investigation, was hesitant as to whether the Agency would ever fully recover.
This forced marriage between CIA and the FBI happened because Agency management forgot a basic CI principle; that is, once an espionage lead is obtained involving an American, the FBI needs to be told immediately so it can, with CIA’s assistance, marshal the resources, in concert with need-to-know principle, to identify and neutralize or arrest the suspected spy. Since Angleton, problems developed when CIA senior managers failed to refer potential or actual espionage leads to the FBI in a timely and thorough manner. Counterintelligence was held in contempt and criticized for being unwilling to share information, when the real culprit was an interagency rivalry caused principally by senior Agency officials. CIA took care of the rivalry aspect by appointing know-nothings as CI chiefs.
There have been successful CI operations and American spies have been arrested, but the mistakes being made were not minor. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Washington), commenting on the Chinese success in penetrating U.S. nuclear laboratories, said they “were conducting a very systematic espionage campaign against the United States. We shouldn’t be surprised by that. We were surprised at how ineffective our counterespionage has been.”24
Acting DCI Tenet also failed to notify the Justice Department that a possible crime was committed by former DCI John Deutch, who had classified information on his government-provided computer that was designated for unclassified use only. Tenet’s lame excuse was that no one advised him about the possibility of a crime, and he didn’t believe Deutch committed any crime because he had no intent to compromise classified information. However, there was reasonable evidence that Deutch mishandled classified data in violation of the standards prescribed by the applicable crimes reporting statue. In addition, Justice should have been notified, if nothing else, based on executive order and the memorandum of understanding in effect. Tenet didn’t suffer from this lack of judgment but was promoted to DCI.
Tenet again blundered when he told the president that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When his assessment was being seriously questioned, he jetted off to the Middle East and told one CIA station chief that the chief had to find proof for him. Tenet was desperate and knew his job was on the line. When no proof came, Tenet was gone. Despite justice being finally done, it just proves that nothing in Washington seems to change.
I know some people may disagree, either mildly or vehemently, with my assessment, but I am not the only one who believes this. I will quote from the article “The CIA in Chains,” found on the website Strategy Page:
Congress wants to outlaw many real or imagined techniques that the CIA has employed since September 11, 2001. Much of this effort is political, to placate the many people, and politicians, who now take it as fact (or on faith) that the Islamic terrorist threat was overblown, or that the U.S. response was not commensurate (and itself a form of terrorism) with the threat. It’s already been forgotten what the CIA has gone through these past five years. There was the massive recruiting program (of analysts and field operators), and the introduction of lots of new technology (especially for the analysts) and techniques. All this was largely the result of the CIA being put into a sort of semi-hibernation in the late 1970s. This was an aftereffect of the Church Committee, an investigative operation sponsored by Congress that sought to reform the CIA. The reforms were mainly about eliminating CIA spying inside the United States, and doing stuff for the president that Congress did not approve of. There was also a desire to avoid any CIA connection with foreign unpleasantness (like using unsavory people as spies or informants). This led to a growing list of restrictions on what the CIA could do overseas, and at home.
Unheralded in success, pilloried in failure, the CI professional encounters little esteem in the traditional sense from CIA senior managers. Unless this attitude changes, the only way CI will be taken off life support is for someone to finally pull the plug and declare this discipline dead.